Van Jones, the Red 'Green Czar,' Is a Truther Too

By the time you read this, if the Obama administration is smart, Van Jones and the guys who vetted him will be leaving government to spend more time with their families.

In another example of either poor administration vetting of appointees or atrocious judgment, the administration made Van Jones their "green czar" (special advisor for green jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality).

In the past few days he’s been revealed on tape calling the president’s opponents by a vulgar term for which he apologized on Wednesday to Politico. But that’s small potatoes.

In 2005 Jones told the East Bay Express that the acquittal of Rodney King's assailants in 1992 in that infamous police brutality case changed him significantly. "I was a rowdy nationalist on April 28th, and then the verdicts came down on April 29th," he said. "By August, I was a communist." Jones and other young activists in 1994 formed a group called Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement, or STORM, rooted in Marxism and Leninsm[sic].

In 2004, he signed a petition which demanded an investigation into what the Bush administration knew about 9/11 before it occurred, indicating that they allowed the attack to provide a pretext for war. Denying he was a “truther” and claiming he’d signed the petition without reading it or understanding its meaning (qualifying him, I suppose, for Congress), he has been caught acting as a truther long before his signature appears on the petition.

In a statement issued Thursday evening Jones said of "the petition that was circulated today, I do not agree with this statement and it certainly does not reflect my views now or ever." He did not explain how his name came to be on the petition. An administration source said Jones says he did not carefully review the language in the petition before agreeing to add his name.

Whoever advanced that Jones defense did so without much investigation -- or under the assumption that a supine press wouldn’t check it out either. Wrong again.

Yesterday, news broke out that Barack Obama's communist Green Czar was a 9-11 Truther. The administration much later in the day released a statement saying Van Jones was "not now or ever" involved in the 9-11 Truther movement.